


From One Universe to the Next

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Getting Together, Parallel Universes, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 01:43:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8125635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Fitz and Jemma, in this world and quite a few others. (Or, the universe is getting rather exasperated with splitting itself.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agent85](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent85/gifts).



> Happy birthday!!!! I very much hope you like this!

_Universe-616_   
Agent Leo Fitz and Agent Jemma Simmons meet at the Academy. They are seventeen and remarkably blind to the fine nuances of friendship, and so they spend a good three weeks after they've been paired up as lab partners speaking to each other in monosyllables. Then he nearly drops a beaker containing a fragile compound that was two days' worth of work and they're too busy arguing to remember to be shy around each other. 

They become permanent lab partners and best friends and somewhere along the way, they fall in love. There are things that the universe throws into their path—the virus that scorches through her blood, the ninety feet of water that he nearly gets lost in, the rock that sucks her through to the other end of the universe—but in the end, it is them. Fitz and Jemma, hands firmly linked together, drinking each other in every time their eyes meet and holding on all the more tightly for all the times they've nearly lost each other.

It is a good story, but it is not the only one.

_Universe 16_  
Jemma Simmons has lived next door to Leo Fitz forever. There are pictures of them crawling around on the same blanket and finger painting together when they were just babies. (Her pictures were always perfect and precise, his great smears of color.) Her mother drives them both to school every morning and his mother makes them snacks after school and during the day, they're glued to each other's sides. He eats the chips out of her lunch and she makes him buy posterboard for the science fair and he'll always go with her to collect moss samples off the playground and she'll always listen to him talk about his latest elaborate plan for a robot that will clean his room. 

The year that Jemma turns ten, her father is up for a promotion. “It's in New York,” Jemma says to Fitz, sprawled out in her backyard, and wrinkles her nose up at the sky. “All the way across the country.”

“What happens if he gets it?” Fitz asks and turns on his side to face her, fingers nervously tapping against the ground.

“He won't get it,” Jemma says confidently. “Or if he does, we won't have to move. We have a mortgage and everything. And my mother would never give up her mint green kitchen.”

There are three ways that this goes.

_Universe 16a_  
Jemma's father doesn't get the job. He grumbles for a few weeks about it but her mother is remarkably smug about getting to keep her kitchen and although Jemma doesn't say anything about it, she's secretly grateful that they don't have to leave the house she's known all her life, with its dark wood bookshelves and massive trees in the yard and blue-eyed boy next door. 

On Jemma's fifteenth birthday, they host a party outside in the backyard. There's paper lanterns hanging in the trees and soft acoustic music playing on the speakers and tables that groan underneath the weight of the food and everyone's too busy to notice that Jemma's spent most of the night talking to Fitz.

“I've got a present for you,” he tells her. “'s nothing much, really. I just wanted to give it to you before everyone else swooped in.”

It's a necklace, stamped with her favorite constellation and Fitz's hands only shake a little when he fastens it around her neck. “I made it myself,” he says. “So it might be a little lopsided but--”

“It's perfect,” Jemma breathes and steps closer to him. Even in the dark, Fitz's eyes are the bluest thing she's ever seen and she could swear that she hears his heart pounding out of his chest. (She doesn't admit that hers is racing too.)

On her fifteenth birthday, underneath the tree that's older than she is, Jemma Simmons kisses the boy next door and never looks back.

_Universe 16b_  
Her father gets the promotion and they pack up their lives into cardboard boxes and hard-sided suitcases and drive all the way from Oregon to New York. Jemma sends a postcard to Fitz from every single place they stop at, writing cheerful anecdotes on the back and trying not to sound like she misses him desperately.

“You can always call him on my phone, honey,” her mother offers. “Don't you want to actually talk to Fitz?”

“Letters require effort. How else is Fitz going to know that I care?” Jemma says haughtily and sticks her chin in the air. Her mother just sighs and passes her another postcard stamp. Jemma sticks it on the back of an image of the Grand Canyon ( _It really is the most amazing thing, Fitz,_ she writes. _Let's go someday_ ) and asks where the nearest post office is.)

Jemma writes postcards to Fitz for the next eight years. She sends them to him from New York and from Washington DC, from Springfield, Illinois and Albany, New York, from London and from the Bahamas, from Hong Kong and from Sydney as her father's job takes them further and further away. Fitz keeps each and every one of them in a box under his bed.

A few days after her eighteenth birthday, Jemma sends him a postcard from San Diego. _I'll see you in a week_ , it reads. _Love, Jemma._

Fitz thinks about that Love, Jemma for the entire week until she shows up on his doorstep.

_Universe 16c_  
Her father gets the job and Jemma...Jemma has no intention of doing so but she finds herself falling in love with New York and falling out of touch with Fitz. She doesn't mean to, she really doesn't, but she's caught up in the towering shelves of the Strand and the way the trees in Central Park change colors and her new friendship with Bobbi Morse, the only other girl at Jemma's expensive private school who's half as enthusiastic about biology lab.

The letters and phone calls trail off eventually, but Jemma still finds herself talking about Fitz sometimes. “I had this friend when I was little...” “My friend Fitz used to...” Bobbi starts shooting her significant looks when they start high school and she's still talking about Fitz, then when they start college and she's still telling the story about the time she and Fitz tried to train her dog using Pavlovian conditioning. 

“You know, you could always find him,” Bobbi points out. “For all you know, he could be going to school right here in New York.”

“If it's going to happen, it'll happen,” Jemma says patiently. Some things are inevitable, after all.

She's twenty-two when she sees Leo Fitz again. She's late to work, pushing her way through the tourist hordes, and she spots him on the other side of the street and does one of the ridiculous rom com things that she always swore she'd never do. Jemma sprints across the street, narrowly avoids getting hit by an irate taxi driver, and skids to a halt right in front of him.

“Fitz,” she gasps out.

“Jemma,” he says, like he's been waiting for her all along. 

 

_Universe 118_  
They're brilliant. They're at the Academy. They're slowly, tentatively working their way towards friendship. Then she has a lab accident. There's crossed wires and an experimental liquid and a light left on late at night and a million tiny coincidences and...well, afterward Jemma will tell herself that she can't waste any time on thinking how she might have prevented it. She's too busy trying to keep herself from going crazy.

“I promise I can control it,” she tells Agent Weaver, clenching her hands together tightly underneath the table to stop their shaking. 

“I'm even collecting data on myself to use for a scientific study,” Jemma adds, trying to make a joke of it. Agent Weaver doesn't laugh. 

“You really think you can prevent this...ability from overwhelming you?” Agent Weaver asks.

“I do,” Jemma says. She hopes she isn't lying.

In one universe, Agent Weaver believes her. In the other, she doesn't. 

_Universe118a_  
Three days after Jemma is officially released into the wilds of the Academy, Fitz shows up on her doorstep with a bag full of Indian takeout in one hand and a Doctor Who DVD in the other.

“Fitz?” she blinks blearily at him and tries to shut out the rush of emotions she's getting from him. Other people aren't neat, exactly, but their feelings at least slide from one to the next in a somewhat predictable manner. (She's developing a model.) Fitz, however...Fitz is a whirlwind of things that she thinks even he can't decipher and still half-asleep, Jemma stumbles into his thicket of concern and curiosity and exasperation and underneath it all, a warm knot of something that feels strangely familiar and that makes a similar warmth radiate through her chest. Fitz is looking at her strangely (her eyes must have gone blank again or maybe that strange shade of black) and Jemma pulls back. Hard.

“Simmons? Are you all right? You were gone for a week and I—you can't disappear on your lab partner like that!” he says indignantly. “I tried contacting the administration about it and all they told me was that you were on medical leave. Then I got one of the comms students to hack into the mainframe but I couldn't find anything there either so--”

“You went to all that trouble for me?”

“Yes, well--” Fitz shifts from foot to foot anxiously, both hands shoved into his pockets. “Wasn't going to give up the best lab partner I've ever had, was I?”

Something inside Jemma melts. She invites him in for Indian and Doctor Who (he must have heard her say that Nine was her favorite, during one of the rambling discussions they always seem to have when they should be focused solely on the assignment) and they end up staying up until the sun rises and eating her Ben and Jerry's straight out of the carton. And somehow, she ends up telling him.

“I can sense people's emotions,” she says. “Sometimes their thoughts too, if I really concentrate. So I can't be around too many people at once or it overwhelms me. I tried going out for coffee the other day and I just—people want so much, Fitz. I never knew.”

Fitz pulls her in against him and lets her cuddle into his side and eventually, he starts talking about experiments they can run to determine the extent of her powers and gadgets he can create to help her handle it. It's then that Jemma knows they're going to be best friends.

Years later, after the Chitauri, when she sense something entirely more than friendship hovering in the back corners of Fitz's head, she doesn't say anything about it. Some things take their own time.

_Universe 118b_  
Fitz's lab partner disappears. No one besides him seems to care. So he goes digging and what he finds is enough to convince him to drop out of the Academy and go digging some more. He plasters posters with Jemma's face on them across half of the Eastern Seaboard and chases down tips that lead him to dead-end alleys and distinctly seedy warehouses and conducts interviews with grumpy farmers in the middle of nowhere who are convinced that they saw a man in a cape flying over their cornfields and sells his stories for whatever he can get. He gets a reputation as the press' resident superhero conspiracy freak but he's as surprised as anyone else when aliens invade New York and the Washington Post offers him a permanent job. 

He never thought that he'd end up being a journalist but it suits him better than he ever could have imagined, the long days and longer nights and the sheer electric surge of tracking down a story. SHIELD hates him with a fiery burning passion, of course. After it's revealed that HYDRA's been lurking at its heart all along, they hate him a little bit less. Maria Hill, who's been busy picking up the pieces of SHIELD after Nick Fury's death, even hires him to do some contract work for them, see if any of the confidential information he's picked up over the years points to where potential HYDRA agents might be hiding.

He's elbow-deep in the SHIELD archives, humming happily to himself and wondering if Maria would notice if he pilfered Hank Pym's contact information, when Jemma Simmons walks in through the door. He nearly drops an entire stack of classified documents. 

“You're surprised to see me,” she says flatly. “A little excited, a little nervous, and generating quite a lot of theories about what could have happened to me to make me disappear. I quite like the one about the aliens.”

“Are you—you can't—Jemma, can you read minds?” What he really wants to say involves a long string of swear words that he's fairly sure are banned in at least three counties.

“Exactly, Dr. Watson.”

“I—I always pictured you as Watson,” Fitz says slowly and is rewarded with a brilliant smile. They'd argued over who would be Sherlock and who would be Watson for a good half-hour once at the Academy. “But Jemma—what--how--when--just what? I went looking for you, you know. For months and months.”

“I know. And I--I'd love to explain it all to you. Maybe over coffee?”

Neither of them drink coffee but he says yes anyway.

_Universe 277_  
In this universe, there are no superheroes, no aliens or robots attempting to destroy the Earth, no World War II legends frozen in the ice and revived nearly seventy years later. There are still spies and secret agencies, however, and Fitz and Jemma happen to belong to one of the best. He makes the guns and she shoots them.

“You only get this one if you promise not to wreck the car this time,” Fitz says and tries to look stern as he flips open the stainless steel briefcase to display the new gadgets he's had designed for her.

“I was trying to shake them. How could I possibly know that would involve going underwater?” Jemma says innocently and bats her eyes at him. 

“I'm not susceptible to your wiles, Simmons. Unlike every attractive male between here and Sydney. Who was the one who you nearly got killed the last time, the Italian crime lord's son?”

“Giovanni and I are still on very good terms, thank you!” Jemma protests. “Just friends now. You know that I only have eyes for you, Q.”

“You only say that so I'll get you the best gadgets,” Fitz grumbles. He lets her take his prototype exploding pen anyway. 

He's always had a weak spot for Jemma Simmons. He's beginning to suspect that it's slightly more than that.

_Universe 342_  
This is one of the universes where they have nothing to do with science at all. Then, it's not a universe that's particularly scientifically inclined. He is a farm boy and she is quite possibly the most beautiful woman in the world and when she hears that he's been killed by the Dread Pirate Roberts, she sobs her heart out.

She doesn't care about anything if she can't have Fitz. In fact, she's determined to be as unhappy as possible. So when Prince Ward proposes, she accepts. And when an unlikely trio consisting of a man who thinks rather well of himself named Gonzales, a giant named Mack, and a swordswoman dressed all in black named Bobbi accosts her in the woods, she lets herself be kidnapped. But when the man in black insists on dragging her across a mountain and recounting exactly how he murdered her true love, she's had quite enough. So she pushes him down the mountain.

Unfortunately, she only realizes that the man in black is Fitz _after_ she pushes him. 

_Universe 451_  
This is the universe where things splinter. They are supposed to meet half a dozen times and each time that they do (or don't), the universe tears itself in half once again with a massive sigh. (One suspects that the universe is getting a little tired of contorting itself around two scientists' poor sense of timing.)

_Universe 451a_  
They don't meet at the Academy. Jemma takes a perverse pleasure in saying that no, she doesn't know him whenever people ask her about the other resident child prodigy. (Secretly, she'd quite like to be the only one.) Then, at SciOps, they are placed in the same lab.

“The engineering department is down the hall, Agent Fitz,” she informs him, chin tilted high.

“Trust me, I know. They didn't have space so I got shoved down here,” he says and turns his attention to unpacking all his cases of equipment. “Just don't touch anything and we'll get along fine.”

“Same goes for you.” Jemma tells herself sternly that she is not the least bit interested in the drones he's designing. She lasts a whole two weeks before she marches over to his workstation and tells him a better method of making one of his drones sensitive to smell.

_Universe 451b_  
They don't meet at Sci-Ops either. There's enough space left over in the engineering lab and they spend years hearing about each other and never quite working up the courage to introduce themselves. Then they both get picked for Coulson's team.

“Agent Fitz,” she says, surveying the tiny lab space they're meant to share. (Honestly, what was Coulson thinking?”

“Agent Simmons.”

Two hours later, they're arguing over his latest invention, a nonlethal weapon he wants to call the Night-Night Gun despite the fact that at the moment, it couldn't knock anyone out if its life depended on it. Send them off for a pleasant nap, maybe. Or scar them for life, depending on how it's feeling that day.

Two weeks later, the Night-Night Gun is fully operational. Jemma is impressed with them in spite of herself.

_Universe 451c_  
The same year that Jemma puts in her application for Coulson's team, Fitz leaves to go work for Stark Industries. Jemma hears it through the Academy gossip grapevine and reassures herself that while he may get a state-of-the-art lab and a month of paid vacation a year, she gets adventure and excitement. Perhaps too much excitement, after she nearly gets frozen by Donnie Gill, shot by half a dozen HYDRA agents, and has to be rescued by one of the most impressive women she's ever met.

Her next mission involves being a polite ambassador to Stark Industries, perhaps because there's a significantly lower chance of her getting shot at there. As it turns out, she's not very good at being polite to Leo Fitz. He likes her anyway.

“Tell me, Simmons,” he asks one day, watching her poke and prod at a biological sample someone sent in to Stark that makes his stomach turn if he so much as looks at it. “What did you do to get stuck with me?”

“Oh, terrible things,” she waves her hand vaguely at him and pokes the sample again. “I nearly got myself killed half a dozen times.”

“Just imagine,” Fitz says quietly. “I could have never met you.”

_Universe 451d_  
Leo Fitz, chief engineer at Stark Industries, gets called in to pull a SHIELD agent out of an Inhuman monolith. When Jemma Simmons opens her eyes in his arms, Fitz feels something snag and catch in his chest. 

 

_Universe 1_  
On a cloudy August day in Scotland, Leopold Fitz is born in a crowded hospital in Glasgow. Less than a month later, Jemma Simmons is born and promptly brought home to a sprawling house in Sheffield.

They have absolutely no idea yet, but someday, somehow, it will be him and her, irrevocably and inevitably. The universe has decreed it.


End file.
